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From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity's destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In "Epidemiology," from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), we see the zombie's affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the "Golden Age of Television," what media scholars also call, "Peak" or "Prestige TV." In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology is the property of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Taking the slogan "no lives matter" as a starting point to diagnose the nihilism of our contemporary political culture, in this essay I tie the rise of nihilism to the resurgence of far-right political movements, chiefly the neo-reactionary thought of Nick Land. Following my discussion of Land and the culture of apocalyptic nihilism, I elucidate a Black feminist and decolonial perspective that, I argue, resists this creeping nihilism, and instead offers avenues of engaged political praxis for recuperating the politics of personhood. Using Sylvia Wynter's work as an exemplar of such a perspective, I perform a rhetorical criticism of Land's essay "The Dark Enlightenment" through the lens of Wynter's understanding of the human. Critiquing his arguments, I argue that Wynter's work offers a radical alternative to Land's apocalypticism and antihumanism, one that maintains a commitment to reimagining the human rather than disavowing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

iZombie (2015–19) is set in Seattle where part of its population is infected with a zombie virus created by a corporation. iZombie sustains the productive use of the zombie to explore consumption and late-stage capitalism, but unlike most other zombie fiction, situates this in a familiar, banal present where social and governmental institutions, laws and bureaucracies continue to operate. Central to these questions is the role and responsibility of corporations, situated within an eminently recognizable, but not particularly effective, law and order. iZombie accurately portrays the continued production of a dangerous product within a legal framework that protects corporations and investors, rather than customers. Given the dependence of zombies on access to brains, the series sheds light on the responsibility of consumers, legal authorities and broader society in perpetuating harms. In light of our increasing dependence upon corporations and the systemic harms that they cause, what kinds of justice are available? This article will consider how corporate wrongdoing, legal conceptions of corporate criminal responsibility and the im/possibility of justice are mis/represented in the first season of the series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The well-known narrative of zombies, the reanimated monsters of contemporary popular culture, can be traced back to the late 1960s, or more specifically to the release of the film Night of the Living Dead (1968) by American director George A. Romero. However, at the time of the film's inception the term zombie was already widely present in American popular culture: the cinematography of voodoo zombie, created in Haiti through magic and psychoactive substances, appeared in America in 1932, with the release of the film White Zombie, based on the travelogue The Magic Island (1929), by American missionary William Seabrooke. The paper initially points to the social and historical circumstances that led to the spread of zombies in Haiti: as the first independent nation of the Western Hemisphere, Haiti at the beginning of the twentieth century became the subject of American imperialist strategies and a threat to the maintenance of hegemony, therefore in the texts of colonial travel writers it was described as a nation of savagery, black magic, powerful voodoo cults, and the reanimated dead. Cultural and racist stereotypes that were transmitted to the United States justified the American "civilizing" mission, i.e. political and economic interventions. The role of zombies in Haiti was that of a slave, a profitable workforce, used by local urban elites, voodoo sorcerers, and colonial regimes since the eighteenth century. In this regard, my analysis highlights the ways in which White Zombie reproduces the established image of Haiti as an exotic place filled with mystery and dangers, adopts the dominant American viewpoints marked by discrimination and racism, and sets cultural norms of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbaric, whereby the white color of the skin reflects the norm of the civilized. To this end, the dialectic of slavery is emphasized in the film by the zombification of a young white woman, thus manifesting the tensions that existed between the imperialist powers and their "subjects" of enslavement, and emphasizing the unequal power relations between subordinate Haitian slaves and Westerners in high positions. Finally, the changes that have taken place over the decades of the zombie monster's development are highlighted: the zombie moves away from Haiti and approaches the modern world, and becomes a reanimated, highly infectious, cannibalistic monster of consumer society, that is, a monster of the global capitalist system.

From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity’s destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In “Epidemiology,” from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), we see the zombie’s affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the “Golden Age of Television,” what media scholars also call, “Peak” or “Prestige TV.” In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional.

Perhaps due to its relatively recent release, Cam has suffered a significant lack of scholarly attention. Critical and popular reception has focused on the film as a meditation on the darker sides of the internet, adopting a realist paradigm in which the doppelgangers infecting online sex workers are deepfakes and the product of virtual surveillance. In this study, we propose that the post-cinematic ethos of the film both invites and defies a clear interpretive framework for naming the anxieties it highlights. Identification of the monstrous, moreover, is invariably aligned with particular, historically implicated epistemological structures. Ultimately, we propose zombieism, particularly Lauro and Embry's posthuman zombii as a productive lens through which to recalibrate our indexing of the labouring, digital (un)dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts a critical philosophical analysis of the ways to reinvent the production of contemporary media culture on the example of two franchises, “The Last of Us” and “Cyberpunk 2077”. Modern media culture is a complex mechanism ensuring the transmission of various messages through the production and subsequent human consumption of media products. Douglas Kellner, following Jean Baudrillard, positions media culture as a spectacle for pleasure. In the digital space, media culture includes a number of mediums, such as video games, movies, music, etc. Since postmodernism is an integral part of modern capitalism, the production of media culture for profit involves the (re)invention of various media texts. Using philosophical vocabulary, the example of the franchises “The Last of Us” and “Cyberpunk 2077” show how such media culture products are created. Simulation, pastichization, and remediation become tools for the production of contemporary media text and thus refer to what has already been produced. The article presents an analysis of video games as a simulative space within the framework of the philosophical categories of Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Gilles Deleuze. The author also analyzes the genre component of franchises using the proposed by Fredric Jameson terminology of pastiche, and the developed by David Bolter and Richard Grusin concept of remediation. Within the “The Last of Us” franchise we can see that the transition from one medium to another, from a video game to a film, is an actively used way of copying media text. When such copying occurs, there is a loss of interactivity with the media text, which can negatively affect the consumer experience. In the “Cyberpunk 2077” franchise the same transition not only does not impair the consumer’s interaction with the media text but complements it by connecting the stories of two different mediums with each other. It is concluded that the analyzed franchises, having a similar base of production, diverge in terms of creativity, showcasing the potential approaches through which media culture products can undergo reimagining and reinvention.

Posthumanism—or, as the philosopher Francesca Ferrando calls it, the philosophy of our time—is in high demand both as a current of thought and as a theoretical tool for analyzing popular culture. The interdisciplinary field of zombie studies is also actively developing. The article proves that zombie studies are a legitimate field of humanities and social sciences. Scholars analyze zombies within the framework of sociology, ethics, neuroscience, international relations, literary studies, etc. As a theoretical tool, many of those studying zombies apply the philosophy of posthumanism. Until now, scholars have mostly been fascinated by the one zombie plot: the zombie apocalypse. However, there is another zombie-related narrative. Some call it a sentient zombie, humanizing the undead. In such a narrative, zombies are redefined, and to them the standard definition of a zombie no longer fits. A new image of the zombie can be revealed through the monster theory. The peculiar humanization of the zombie as a monster can be characterized as posthumanization. Since the classic image of the zombie in this case is redefined, we need to find a new term for the new monster. The author proposes to name the new sentient zombies post-zombies and suggests that their monstrosity should also be redefined, supporting these ideas through the analysis of Day of the Dead (1985), Warm Bodies (2013), and The Girl with All the Gifts (2016). Постгуманизм — философия нашего времени, как называет его философ Франческа Феррандо — крайне востребован и как течение мысли, и как теоретический инструмент для анализа популярной культуры. Междисциплинарная область исследований zombie studies также активно развивается. В статье доказывается, что zombie studies — легитимная область науки. Ее представители анализируют зомби в рамках социологии, этики, нейронауки, международных отношений, литературоведения и т.д. При этом многие из тех, кто изучают зомби, используют философию постгуманизма в качестве теоретического инструмента. До сих пор ученые в основном были увлечены одним нарративом о зомби — зомби-апокалипсисом. Однако автор статьи отмечает, что существует другой нарратив о зомби. Некоторые называют его «разумным зомби» — происходит гуманизация зомби. В этом нарративе зомби переопределяется, и стандартная дефиниция зомби не подходит. Для того чтобы раскрыть новый образ зомби, автор обращается к теории монстра. Так что своеобразная гуманизация зомби как монстра может быть охарактеризована как постгуманизация. Поскольку в данном случае переопределяется классический образ зомби, для нового «монстра» нам необходимо найти новый термин. Автор статьи предлагает называть новых разумных зомби «постзомби», монструозность которого тоже должна быть переопределена. Для этого автор обращается к фильмам, в которых представлен этот нарратив — «День мертвецов» (1985), «Тепло наших тел» (2013), «Новая эра Z» (2016).

Celem artykułu jest ukazanie, jak, mimo ustalonych dawno temu postulatów, nakazujących „oczyszczenie” powieści kryminalnej z elementów fantastycznych i nadprzyrodzonych, motywy te funkcjonują we współczesnych utworach z tego gatunku. Jako kontekst należy wskazać zjawiska dające się zauważyć w najnowszej literaturze i kulturze popularnej. Jednym nich jest zmiana postrzegania typowych monstrów z horroru, które stają się zarówno „mniej groźne”, jak i „bardziej ludzkie”. Kolejnym – zakwestionowanie związku postaci (a także zespołu motywów) z fabułą. To na przykład, co było dotąd typowe dla horroru, może pojawić się w powieści kryminalnej. Przeprowadzono analizę wybranych utworów dwojga współczesnych pisarzy: Katarzyny Puzyńskiej (Czarne narcyzy, Martwiec, Rodzanice i Utopce) oraz Wojciecha Chmielarza (Wampir, Zombie i Wilkołak) pod kątem występowania w nich motywów rodem z powieści grozy. We wszystkich omawianych tekstach to ludzie, a nie potwory są zabójcami. W utworach Chmielarza nazwy rodem z horroru to metafory ludzkiego zła lub szaleństwa (autor odwołuje się do zakorzenionych w kulturze znaczeń słów użytych jako tytuły). Katarzyna Puzyńska z kolei za miejsce zdarzeń wybiera małe, często prawie wyludnione miejscowości, gdzie wciąż żywa jest wiara w duchy, wampiry, nawiedzone domy (autorka odwołuje się między innymi do wierzeń słowiańskich). Ukazuje przy tym siłę ludzkich lęków (dotyczy to, w odpowiednich okolicznościach, nawet policjantów), jak również fakt, że istoty ludzkie potrafią być gorsze od potworów z fikcji literackiej. Motywy rodem z horroru funkcjonują w omawianych tekstach na kilka sposobów: 1) jako odwołania do doświadczenia odbiorcy, który odczytuje np. zaprezentowane w powieści nazwy w oparciu o własną wiedzę; 2) jako element lokalnej lub rodzinnej tradycji (żywy najczęściej w miejscach oddalonych od „centrów”); wreszcie 3) ucieleśnienie ukrytych w ludzkiej psychice obsesji i lęków, które niespodziewanie mogą się ujawnić.

Jim Jarmusch's 2019 zombie flick The Dead Don't Die uses comedy to both critique the zombie genre and confront the many horrors of twenty-first century life. Zombies are symbols for human anxieties, whether those are anxieties about "otherness," anxieties about nuclear annihilation, anxieties about mindless overconsumption, or anxieties about environmental catastrophe. The Dead Don't Die explores all of these anxieties, focusing on the fear of environmental catastrophe. The zombies in The Dead Don't Die rise from their graves because polar fracking has caused the earth's axis to shift, reanimating the dead. In its critique of the zombie genre, the film asks whether the zombie film's history of political and social commentary is still (or ever has been) effective in creating social change. Ultimately, The Dead Don't Die is concerned with the failure of the zombie to produce lasting change and what that means for a world still plagued by greater horrors than the undead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Atlantic modernity, maroon and buccaneer encounters have generated long-lasting legacies that remain largely unexplored. In this essay I trace how these encounters included various forms of mutual recognition among Saint-Domingue's black and white clandestine people. This history of mutual recognition sheds fresh light on the cultural and ideological context informing the role maroon societies were playing in fomenting slave insurrection in the events leading up to the Haitian Revolution. I also argue that it contributed to the development of Haiti's postcolonial identity, folklore, politics, and popular theater. My main sources are colonial records, place names, Vodou mythology, and Haitian intellectual and literary history. I focus on the emergence of zombie and pirate lore as it became one of the most enduring legacies of mutual maroon and buccaneer recognition in Haiti and the Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert. I examine debates over the Cadiz project, a contemporary water project that proposes to take water from a California desert aquifer and transport it to the California coast. I argue that the life of the Cadiz project depends on Cadiz Inc.’s ability to revive the legal rights and body of a little-used railroad shortline, thus bringing back a legal infrastructure and corporate power from the late nineteenth century in the service of a new corporation. In so doing, the Cadiz project enlivens the racialized dispossession of land and labor that the railroad initially required. Routing the politics of a contemporary infrastructure project through the railroad and its octopus past, I argue, places the politics of infrastructure at the intersection of laws, monstrosity, and dispossession. Drawing on economic and legal geography, this paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure, a concept that builds on what activists call zombie projects in order to show the life and death of infrastructure, and reveals how contemporary capitalists enliven old infrastructures for new purposes.

Inasmuch as the society is considered as a body today, social problems should be defined accordingly, as problems of hygiene and cleanliness. In this regard, various representations of zombie corpses in zombie movies can be conceived as concrete examples of threat and a perception of disease. In this article, I claim that the zombie figures in cinema bear a positive potential for the social life of humanity, and I will define this potential as a new opportunity for meeting the absolute alterity. Within this context, I analyse 28 Weeks Later and The World War Z and The Girl with All the Gifts to put forth the idea that what enables emancipation of humanity is contagion and alterity. Rather than destroying the capitalist rationalization without offering any alternatives, zombie corpses enounce the birth of a new form of social life as analysed through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Music videos of the MTV era often use gothic visual signifiers as decorative elements or creative expressions of the musician's star persona or latest record. But several video clips from the early 1980s adapt the figure of gothic monstrosity, and in particular, the images and stories of the undead or beastly Other, in ways that dramatize the music video's evolving aesthetic, commercial, and technological character and its unpredictable relation to Gothic. In this article, I look closely at the narrative elements of two important configurations of gothic-themed video clips: "Don't Go" (1982) by Yazoo, "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)" (1983) by Sheena Easton, and "Mary Jane's Last Dance" (1993) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which creatively adapt textual elements of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein and its various film adaptations and parodies and its cultural significance in the modern Western imaginary; and "Thriller" (1983) by Michael Jackson and "Heads Will Roll" (2009) by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which likewise adapt and reimagine aspects of John Landis's 1981 horror comedy film An American Werewolf in London and its afterlife in the modern media ecosystem. These videos, I argue, trouble conventional understandings of the practice of adaptation as a one-to-one line of inheritance between source material and destination text. In so doing, furthermore, these clips amplify and elaborate certain socio-cultural anxieties about gender and race, personal and professional identity and autonomy, and technological innovation and automation that animate their source materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provided a literary analysis of the film text World War Z (2013, dir. Marc Forster) with a specific focus on the pandemic depicted in the film and its relationship to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This discussion foregrounded the figure of the 'zombie' and the cultural anxieties that this literary figure represents. The pandemic in the film is brought about through an environmental crisis that mimics our own. Mother Earth and nature, personified as female, feature significantly in the film and evoke a discussion on survival, human nature versus animal nature and the figure of the posthuman. This article also employed a cultural studies approach to analyse how the pandemic depicted in the film evokes a Christian religious dimension through a particular scene that takes place in the Holy Land, Jerusalem. The film's depiction of pandemics, religion and the environmental crisis makes it worthy of discussion, especially in light of the current pandemic that the world is facing, with particular focus on humanity's response to it. The dystopian warnings that the film projects have echoes of the current social and ecological challenges that we are grappling with. The conclusion of the film deviates from the 'happy endings' indicative of Hollywood; rather, it engages with a situation where a temporary, substandard solution is found to an ongoing world-wide catastrophe. The ending of the film draws intriguing parallels to our own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and the absence of a cure. Contribution: This article provided a literary analysis of a film text. The discussion drew on cultural studies, popular culture and religion through the lens of Christianity, with a particular focus on the social and cultural anxieties that the figure of the 'zombie' holds as well as cultural interpretations of Mother Earth and nature as female. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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There are many subgenres and a diverse range of creatures in horror cinema. One of these creatures is the Zombie. The Zombie character in cinema has evolved through eras. The Zombie which, in the past, was presented as a creature resurrected after death in horror cinema began to be associated with virii and the apocalypse afterwards. Nowadays, the Zombie in the cinema are beyond the figure of a horror. As a matter of fact, many zombie-themed movies are presented as allegories of apocalypse or as outbreak-themed movies. What is the meaning of the zombies which are the subject of outbreak films? What cultural codes do zombies represent in outbreak-themed films? What does the changes in different adaptations of this myth mean in outbreak-themed movies? Zombies in epidemic films can be likened to slaves that are reprogrammed after a resurrection process. From this point of view, we are to evaluate the movie World War Z, and the data obtained is to be interpreted in our conclusion section.

¿Qué es peor que tener que sobrevivir a un apocalipsis zombi? Hacerlo y que aún así la sociedad te margine si suspendes Selectividad. Así al menos lo temen los chicos de Estamos muertos, serie surcoreana estrenada en Netflix. En este artículo reflexionamos a partir de las tesis del realismo capitalista de Mark Fisher distintos conflictos sociales que la serie nos transmite y que suelen exacerbarse en el género zombi. Con ellos nos permitimos también una reflexión sobre si este género pertenece a lo distópico y qué situación actual tiene la distopía en pleno siglo XXI. La serie nos permitirá reflexionar sobre la extraña situación de la distopía mainstream que no parece acusar la gran cantidad de transformaciones políticas de los últimos años y que parece atrapada en la primera década del siglo. What's worse than having to survive a zombie apocalypse? Doing so and still being ostracised by society if you fail the university entrance exams. At least that's what the guys in All of us are Dead, a South Korean series released on Netflix, fear. In this article, based on Mark Fisher's thesis of capitalist realism, we reflect on different social conflicts that the series transmits to us and which are usually exacerbated in the zombie genre. Through them we also reflect on whether this genre belongs to the dystopian and what is the current situation of dystopia in the 21st century. The series will allow us to reflect on the strange situation of mainstream dystopia, which does not seem to be affected by the many political transformations of the last few years and which seems to be trapped in the first decade of the century.

Bogotá zombie, se levantan los muertos el 9 de Abril y Zugar Zombie son dos obras que reescriben una parte de la historia de la violencia en Colombia en clave de ucronía incluyendo la temática zombi. La primera plantea un contexto alternativo al asesinato del líder político Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, ocurrido en 1948; la segunda evidencia las fatídicas consecuencias de la corrupción política. La metáfora de los muertos vivientes expone la profunda crisis latinoamericana y las desigualdades sociales que se acentúan por motivos políticos o por diferencias de clases. El uso de zombis abre la posibilidad de un tono irónico que estructura la crítica aguda en los dos casos. Para comprender la relevancia de estas manifestaciones artísticas será necesario revisar el género fantástico y de ciencia ficción en Latinoamérica, así como las obras que cuentan con un panorama donde se advierte la presencia constante de zombis con su amenaza horrorosa y a la vez satírica. Bogota zombie, the dead rise on April 9 and Zugar Zombie are two works that rewrite in uchrony a part of the history of violence in Colombia. Both include a zombie theme to narrate the assasination of political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 and the fateful consequences of political corruption, respectively. The metaphor of the living dead exposes the deep Latin-American crisis and social inequalities that are emphasized by political reasons or due to class differences. To fully understand the relevance of these artistic manifestations, it will be necessary to review both the fantastic and science fiction genre in Latin America, as well as the works that have a full picture where the constant presence of zombies with their horrific and satirical threat is noted.

This article examines M. R. Carey’s 2014 zombie apocalypse novel The Girl with All the Gifts through the ecofeminist concept of trans-corporeality as defined by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures. Carey’s heroine Melanie showcases how humans can re-conceptualize their relationship to a more-than-human, or natural, world that is both exterior to the self and always-already a part of the self through fungal agency. Indeed, the novel continuously engages in intimate human-environment interconnections that, in their horrific capacities, are meant to inspire readers to reflect upon their own enmeshment in a larger, material world. The novel’s use of the real fungus Ophiocordyceps as the more-than-human agent that inspires the transformation of humans into zombies provides a vision for how humans can more ethically relate, in posthuman manners, to a more-than-human world. Finally, this article considers the novel as a depiction of slow horror, or a gradual descent into apocalypse.

While American zombie films are staples within the horror genre, often dismissed is the zombie's relationship to both racism and religion. Zombiism emerged from 16th century Haitian Vodou and the cultural context of slavery in Haiti. As such, zombiism, at its core, is a spiritual response to power and racial capitalism. This article argues that zombie films showcase resistance to epistemic violence and challenge the political, economic, and theological relationships that sustain white supremacy. This article analyzes four zombie films--White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Get Out (2017)--through the methodological framework of liberation theology and calls heavily upon the Black liberation theology of James Cone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of Zombies in der Kirche. Das Zombie-Motiv als Allegorie der Säkularisierung in The Walking Dead und Fear the Walking Dead by Daniel Hercenberger Daniel.

Zombis, unlike the zombies prevalent in American pop culture, function in Haitian culture as complex symbols with historically variable meanings - initially depicting the process of enslavement during the transatlantic slave trade, they increasingly became symbols of Haitian revolutions and resistance. This dialectical doubling of the meaning of zombis can still be found in Dany Laferrière's novel Pays sans chapeau, published in 1996. The article reconstructs the origin of zombis, presents a discussion on the meaning of this figure, including dialectical views, and discusses their fictional depictions. The aim of the article is to investigate whether zombis still have a twofold symbolism in narrative, as symbols of both enslavement and revolutionary resistance. By considering the vestigial reminiscences of zombis in Yanick Lahens' novel Douces déroutes, attention is drawn to the processes of gradual loss of zombis' ambivalence and their importance as means of creating Haitian identity and everyday experience. According to the study's conclusions, their absence (or their residual forms) in the novel of the second decade of the 21st century is as significant and interesting as their vitality and omnipresence in the works of writers of previous generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In performing the zombie game, children enact embodied literacies through movement, gesture, and sound, and through incorporating the materiality and the spatiality of the outdoor area. They communicate in many ways, both brutal and subtle, enacting their understandings with each other as well as with other adults. The repeated performance seems to function as a refrain that provides security and calm in a highly unstable world. It de- and re-territorializes the space of the preschool, making and re-making children's worlds. The performance of the game is an embodiment of social context, the enactment of the absorbed lived experience that constitutes a becoming for both zombie child and additional needs child. Through this repeated game we come to understand the agency of these children differently in their capacity to re-create their worlds through play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing the importance of the zombie in the interpretative forms of contemporaneity, this paper aims to actualize the current focus of the phenomenon in order to understand it within a strictly material framework. Its aim therewith is to take the perception of the zombie, not as a symptom or metaphor as commonly done, but as a floating signifier in order to analyze the material conditions that allow it to be understood as a symptom or metaphor. To this end, an observation from the perspective of Gothic Materialism is stated, attending to the implications of the idea of "nonorganic life" in the reshaping of human reality and posing both focuses of the approach, the post-structuralist and the materialist, on the basis of their Deleuzian inspiration. The final purpose is to provide an epistemological ground for the comprehension of this cultural motif of the ominous in biopolitical and aesthetic terms, by means of a comparative analysis of videoludic cases with others in film media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narratives of zombie films articulate social relations in the context of an apocalyic social environment, indicating unstoppable processes of disease spreading through the omnipresence of zombies as the primary infection carriers, emphasizing discourses of biological catastrophe, that is, epidemics of infectious diseases as a potential means of the end of a modern civilization. As portrayed in movies about zombies, epidemics could be observed as a type of imagined future of the virus, that is, as an advanced stage in infectious disease evolution, which leads to the deconstruction and complete collapse of the existing social system, and then to apocalyptic consequences and the forming of a new social order. An epidemic creates conditions in which previously known institutional organization ceases to exist and shapes individual behaviors that transform social environments to meet the demands of new social and biological discourses. Due to such circumstances, social surroundings are significantly changed, and disease establishes itself as a signifier of social strategies, relationships towards the infected, and the area for the redistribution of social power and livelihood. The aim of this paper is to reveal the ways of social reorganization and social disruption caused by the zombie epidemic, emphasizing the role of the disease in reshaping social groups and relationships, with the purpose of analyzing the ways in which movie narratives metaphorize the efficiency of infectious diseases.

This article provided a literary analysis of the film text World War Z (2013, dir. Marc Forster) with a specific focus on the pandemic depicted in the film and its relationship to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This discussion foregrounded the figure of the ‘zombie’ and the cultural anxieties that this literary figure represents. The pandemic in the film is brought about through an environmental crisis that mimics our own. Mother Earth and nature, personified as female, feature significantly in the film and evoke a discussion on survival, human nature versus animal nature and the figure of the posthuman. This article also employed a cultural studies approach to analyse how the pandemic depicted in the film evokes a Christian religious dimension through a particular scene that takes place in the Holy Land, Jerusalem. The film’s depiction of pandemics, religion and the environmental crisis makes it worthy of discussion, especially in light of the current pandemic that the world is facing, with particular focus on humanity’s response to it. The dystopian warnings that the film projects have echoes of the current social and ecological challenges that we are grappling with. The conclusion of the film deviates from the ‘happy endings’ indicative of Hollywood; rather, it engages with a situation where a temporary, substandard solution is found to an ongoing world-wide catastrophe. The ending of the film draws intriguing parallels to our own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and the absence of a cure. Contribution: This article provided a literary analysis of a film text. The discussion drew on cultural studies, popular culture and religion through the lens of Christianity, with a particular focus on the social and cultural anxieties that the figure of the ‘zombie’ holds as well as cultural interpretations of Mother Earth and nature as female.

Zombies were and still are one of the most important symbols of modern mass culture. The zombie discourse originated among African slaves brought to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In many ways, the narratives of the “living dead” were a reaction to the crisis phenomena of plantation life. This is evidenced by the rich comparative material presented on many peoples of the world. Such notions of invulnerability after formal death proved to be an important tool of resistance to new conditions caused by external threats. Termed “revitalization,” they were an important element of the Millennialist movements. While initially the sorcerers who could bring themselves back to life were central to these beliefs, in the following period the focus shifted to the victims of various manipulations, transformed into soulless beings. Leaving the environment of their original “habitat,” zombies took on a new life, occupying a firm place in modern mass culture. Having become a symbol of ruthless exploitation of man, relegated to the level of a machine appendage, zombies proved to be one of the most “productive” symbols. They reflected the main trends in the development of society and even began to function as instruments of philosophical reflection. All this allows us to consider zombies as an indicator of altered society, producing new “walking dead”. The metaphors associated with zombies allows us to conclude that the comprehension of zombies makes modern man begin to perceive them constructively, creating a new image, demonstrating the movement towards humanization.

The popular culture version of the zombie, developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, made only sporadic appearances in South Korean film, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of American and Japanese films before 1988. Thus the first zombie film Monstrous Corpse (Goeshi 1980, directed by Gang Beom-Gu), was a loose remake of the Spanish-Italian Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (1974). Monstrous Corpse was largely forgotten until given a screening by KBS in 2011. Zombies don’t appear again for a quarter of a century. This article examines four zombie films released between 2012 and 2018: “Ambulance”, the fourth film in Horror Stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; Train to Busan (2016) (directed by Yeon Sang-Ho), the first South Korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; Seoul Station (2016), an animation prequel to Train to Busan (also directed by Yeon Sang-Ho); and Rampant (2018, directed by Kim Seong-Hun ), a costume drama set in Korea’s Joseon era. Based on a cognitive studies approach, this article examines two conceptual metaphors which underlie these films: the very common metaphor, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and the endemically Korean metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY.

This article reviews a collection of scholarly works edited by Michael Fürst, Florian Krautkrämer, and Serjoscha Wiemer “The Undead - Zombie Film Theory” (original title “Untot – Zombie Film Theorie”), Munich, Belleville Publishers, 2010, 301 pages, ISBN 978-3-933510-55-6. The reviewer lists the main ideas discussed by the researchers who have contributed to the monograph, briefly summarizes the content and evaluates the scientific significance of the analyzed edition. Three representative essays of the monograph (by W. Fuhrmann, A. Grilli and M. Benecke) receive a closer inspection, as they demonstrate the scope of ideas and methodological approach characteristic of the volume.

Recognizing the importance of the zombie in the interpretative forms of contemporaneity, this paper aims to actualize the current focus of the phenomenon in order to understand it within a strictly material framework. Its aim therewith is to take the perception of the zombie, not as a symptom or metaphor as commonly done, but as a floating signifier in order to analyze the material conditions that allow it to be understood as a symptom or metaphor. To this end, an observation from the perspective of Gothic Materialism is stated, attending to the implications of the idea of “nonorganic life” in the reshaping of human reality and posing both focuses of the approach, the post-structuralist and the materialist, on the basis of their Deleuzian inspiration. The final purpose is to provide an epistemological ground for the comprehension of this cultural motif of the ominous in biopolitical and aesthetic terms, by means of a comparative analysis of videoludic cases with others in film media.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated many enduring social inequalities in countries throughout the world. Sociology instructors are thus likely to incorporate content related to this relationship between the pandemic and inequalities in their courses. This article explores the potential of horror films, specifically the subgenre of zombie apocalypse, as a teaching tool for critically analyzing social inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic. To examine the usefulness of this subgenre of film, I describe and evaluate an assignment and class discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many subgenres and a diverse range of creatures in horror cinema. One of these creatures is the Zombie. The Zombie character in cinema has evolved through eras. The Zombie which, in the past, was presented as a creature resurrected after death in horror cinema began to be associated with virii and the apocalypse afterwards. Nowadays, the Zombie in the cinema is beyond the figure of a horror. As a matter of fact, many zombie-themed movies are presented as allegories of apocalypse or as outbreak-themed movies. What is the meaning of the zombies which are the subject of outbreak films? What cultural codes do zombies represent in outbreak-themed films? What does the changes in different adaptations of this myth mean in outbreak-themed movies? Zombies in epidemic films can be likened to slaves that are reprogrammed after a resurrection process. From this point of view, we are to evaluate the movie World War Z, and the data obtained is to be interpreted in our conclusion section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Zombie es una serie de televisión inspirada en un cómic, en la cual se narran las relaciones de cooperación y conflicto entre zombis y humanos. Dicha convivencia es posible debido a que los zombis se parecen a los humanos cuando están bien alimentados. Esta convivencia representa, de forma figurada, algunos de los conflictos más importantes de nuestro tiempo, como el reconocimiento del otro, los límites de la moralidad kantiana, a favor de la eticidad [sittlichkeit] hegeliana. Además, ilustra problemas más concretos, como la gestión de los flujos de población o la convivencia entre nacionalismos distintos dentro del mismo Estado. Se nos enseña también que la libertad no es una cuestión de pura voluntad moral individual, sino que además necesita de instituciones para desarrollarse, sin que suponga grandes tensiones psíquicas entre egoísmo y altruismo. I Zombieis a television series inspired by a comic book, which depicts the relationship of cooperation and conflict between zombies and humans. This coexistence is made possible by the fact that zombies resemble humans when they are well fed. This coexistence figuratively represents some of the most important conflicts of our time, such as the recognition of the other, the limits of Kantian morality in favour of Hegelian ethical life [sittlichkeit]. It also illustrates more concrete problems, such as the management of population flows or the coexistence of different nationalisms within the same state. We are also taught that freedom is not a matter of purely individual moral will, but that it also needs institutions to develop, without involving great psychic tensions between egoism and altruism.

Music videos of the MTV era often use gothic visual signifiers as decorative elements or creative expressions of the musician’s star persona or latest record. But several video clips from the early 1980s adapt the figure of gothic monstrosity, and in particular, the images and stories of the undead or beastly Other, in ways that dramatize the music video’s evolving aesthetic, commercial, and technological character and its unpredictable relation to Gothic. In this article, I look closely at the narrative elements of two important configurations of gothic-themed video clips: “Don’t Go” (1982) by Yazoo, “Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)” (1983) by Sheena Easton, and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” (1993) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which creatively adapt textual elements of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and its various film adaptations and parodies and its cultural significance in the modern Western imaginary; and “Thriller” (1983) by Michael Jackson and “Heads Will Roll” (2009) by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which likewise adapt and reimagine aspects of John Landis’s 1981 horror comedy film An American Werewolf in London and its afterlife in the modern media ecosystem. These videos, I argue, trouble conventional understandings of the practice of adaptation as a one-to-one line of inheritance between source material and destination text. In so doing, furthermore, these clips amplify and elaborate certain socio-cultural anxieties about gender and race, personal and professional identity and autonomy, and technological innovation and automation that animate their source materials.

The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates within specific histories, discourses, and affective relationships, this article examines a particular collection of images: the Time magazine photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims. The article argues that the photos evoke the uncanny by using the Haitian zombie motif – an image of 'monstrous' black racial difference. The article traces the photos' elicitation of the uncanny in two ways: one, it highlights how the images produce self/other slippages and thus affirm the uncanny; and two, it examines the insidious and violent ways these slippages dehumanize, dismember, and dispossess those depicted to produce a 'negative familiarity' for the non-black observer, thus lending to the banality of antiblack violence. The article ends with a call for 'radical empathy' to combat this violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]